


In a Garden, Under the Sky

by clouder (selfinduced)



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: F/M, First Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-26
Updated: 2008-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-10 18:52:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/103001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selfinduced/pseuds/clouder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers for the end of the Earth/Babylon 5 war, when Marcus saves Susan using that alien life-draining machine. A fix-it story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In a Garden, Under the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Started as an entry for Porn Battle VI, but it kind of...kept growing. Marcus wanted his first time to be special, and I love Marcus, so I wanted to do right by him. You know, taking my time and going slow and all. /smirk

One commits one ultimate selfless act and suddenly becomes communal property. Never mind all the selfless things he’s done on a daily basis that didn’t involve draining his lifeforce to save the woman he lo—alright, so it’s a little embarrassing actually trying to articulate that part, even in his head, and honestly, he kind of hadn’t expected a station-wide donate-life-force-for-the-dying-Ranger operation that would require him to even attempt to do it in the first place.

But they had, and so he is, and it’s suddenly as if they all feel they own him, having given a few minutes of their lives towards his own, smiling, waving, patting, weird-hand-touching that he’s not sure if he should take personally—though he’d never really known the Drazi to be a touchy-feely race before.

All things considered, it seems most prudent for Marcus to not be out and about in public, though that seems not to deter those who know the location of his quarters.

The one person Marcus doesn’t see these days is Ivanova.

When he first woke up, it had been to the sight of her tired eyed in a medlab chair, holding his hand, and he would’ve been sure he was dreaming, were it not for the pain and a most dreadful case of cotton mouth.

“You’re awake,” she’d said, face soft and smudged and bemused like she hadn’t slept in days and wasn’t sure of reality, “how’re you feeling?” She’d offered water and he’d gulped some gratefully before speaking.

“A bit chilly,” he’d managed to murmur, “mostly confused about why you aren’t resting.”

She’d smiled all out at that, saying, “I will now,” and climbed into his cot, wrapping around him until he forgot about being cold.

When next he woke up, it was to find himself in her arms and wondering if he’d died after all and gone to the really good place.

-

That was six standard days ago, and he tries not to notice that, he really does, except it’s a bit conspicuous and he’s a Ranger, after all. He can’t not notice things, or not do something about them. They have to work together and it’s not as if he got down on one knee in front of the entire White Star fleet and proposed or anything, he really shouldn’t be punished for—and also—what a way to send mixed messages!

This is how Marcus ends up pacing (unobtrusively!) in front of Susan’s quarters in the evening when he knows she’ll be coming back from C&amp;C.

“Marcus,” her face is shuttered and blank, but her eyes flicker over him with concern that makes his heart stumble stupidly with hope.

“Susan!” He goes for the bright and cheerful.

She attempts to smile back, a little confused and he can’t help it, he imagines the way she looked with her face tucked into his shoulder, hand curled over his chest, protective, and his insides do a funny twisting thing Lennier had told him had to do with love (and he’d personally had some reservations about in the beginning, Minbari physiology being somewhat different than that of humans and all).

She’s staring quizzically at him, “Is something the matter?”

“Right, yes, is good, no, actually, very bad, you see—” he makes an expansive hand-motion, “we—I, in a manner of speaking, well, it’s.” He hadn’t actually gotten this far in his plans “I can leave the station, if you like.” He blurts, finally, somewhat horrified at himself.

She frowns, “What?”

“I mean, I don’t want to, of course, but it’s—I have to, I can’t—you’re uncomfortable, and I can stay aboard one of the—Delenn probably needs me out on errands as such, anyway, and—”

Her eyes soften, and she waves them into her quarters, giving him a moment to regroup.

“I don’t know what you want of me. When I woke, I thought—” he stares helplessly at her.

She meets his look intently for a moment, cups his face, and kisses him. It should probably be a little embarrassing how easily he gives into it, utterly without question, let alone protest.

When she draws back he gets distracted by how he can still taste her on his lips.

“That!” he points, narrowing his eyes and lifting his chin, “And you’ve been avoiding me! What—why—”

Susan rolls her eyes and does it again, more deliberately this time, drawing him close until he can feel her pressed against himself and it’s soft and slow and sweet and he’s sort of lost in the warmth of it before he remembers that this means he can touch too—slide his hands down her arms, her shoulders, the small of her back, the enchantingly soft skin at the back of her neck under her hair.

When he curls his hand and his fingernails graze lightly on her skin, the kiss turns deeper, and it becomes something entirely new, full of hunger he’d never let himself dwell on before, never really imagined feeling returned. Never expected the hands hot and quick all over him, pushing, unbuckling, working their way under his clothes—he’d always thought that he’d—

“I—can I—?” she lays her palm open on his stomach under his shirt and mouths the side of his neck hesitantly.

“You know, I’d think it fairly obvious by now but if you need me to spell it out for you—”

“It’s just, I don’t want you to regret—”

“Oh for the love of—Susan, please, if you stop touching me now I think I really will die, this time.”

She exhales a laughing “Alright.”

Marcus supposes he should’ve expected to lose all clothing but for his trousers at that point, feeling rather conspicuous in the middle of her quarters—but there’s relief in it, to be so open and exposed under her gaze, to meet her eyes and have her _know_.

(_ You know what I have done and would do again and what it means; you cannot give it back._)

They lean close with foreheads touching, and Susan’s hands stroke from the inside of his palm, up his arm, and wrap around his shoulder, where she lays wet, open-mouthed kisses like words she doesn’t know how to say yet.

-

He makes a low noise in his throat, turning into her hair, and she smirks a little, pushing him back until he falls on her bed, wide-eyed and breathless, watching her strip as she comes towards him.

He can’t decide if he’s disappointed when she kisses right below his navel and works her way up instead of down, but this way her mouth is back on his and already he’s grown addicted to it, the way he had to her half-smile or the slightest indication that she was amused at any of his antics. He lifts his head to kiss her, pulling her close until there’s skin-to-skin contact all along the lengths of their bodies.

Breasts, Marcus thinks hazily as hers press and mold to his chest and disbelieving hands, are possibly the most amazing appendages in all of creation.

She nuzzles behind his ear and strokes a maddening hand up and down on the tented front of his trousers, “When you said you’d never—what exactly does that mean?”

“Is that information, um” he blinks hard to focus against the tongue tracing the shell of his ear, “really necessary?”

She draws back to look at him, “Well, I have to know what I’m working with,” her voice is far too amused. It’s, unsurprisingly, something his body, (treacherous, treacherous body!) finds devastatingly attractive.

“I’m sure anything you want to do to me will be right,” he shivers slightly with a sudden flare of heat as he stares back into blue eyes darkened with pupils blasted wide.

She bites her lower lip and nods, hooking a finger into his trousers and pulling down, down, deliciously _down_.

He watches silent as her mouth brushes the inside of his thigh, follows the curve of his hipbones, the creases at the tops of his thighs, and finally, finally, “Oh sweet Valen” he gasps sharply, head dropping back and hips lifting off the bed.

He doesn’t miss her smirk, nor the muttered, “Good. I thought so,” but is appeased by the onset of warm, wet, bliss.

“I, uh, don’t mean to interrupt,” he pants, determined, “I mean, I really really don’t, and I may be a little, uh, short, on experience in this particular field, that is to say, I’ve never—but it’s just that um. This is all going to be over very soon if you keep—”

She shakes with laughter, mouth still wrapped around him, and Marcus knows it should not feel so good to be laughed at, but, in Valen’s name, this is nothing like his own hand.

“_Susan_” the plea is not quite a whine, because Rangers do not do such things, but were anyone to be listening, it would be extremely hard to discern the difference.

She laughs more and strokes his thigh soothingly before sidling up his body, breasts dragging sinfully on his skin, mouth detouring to the inside of his elbow, his upper arm, back to his neck, “What do you want, then?”

He groans and moves up to catch her in a kiss, fingers gripping her hips and pulling her up farther so he can nuzzle up into her breasts, lick skin and draw a tightened nipple into his mouth, which turns out to be an absolutely fantastic idea, as it makes her breath catch and swear unintelligibly in Russian and grind down onto him, and oh, _oh_.

She moves her hips in place over him, sliding hot and wet and perfectly aligned for—for, oh. He gulps.

“Tell me you want this.” Her voice is quiet and low and undeniable.

“I want _you_.” he says.

She nods, biting her lip, “That’ll do,” and reaches a hand down between them, lifting him up and bearing down.

There’s a good chance he says something really embarrassing at that point, during that first, endless moment of her sliding onto him, enclosing him, surrounding, tight and fitted in a way her mouth hadn’t been, until—he breathes in wonder, all the way inside of her.

Her eyes flutter half-closed and she stops moving, lower lip bitten in concentration.

“Give me a second, it’s been a while,”

“Oh,” he stares up at her, “Oh, God, _Susan_” his voice cracks, hips bucking involuntarily upward.

For once she doesn’t smile or laugh, just keeps her eyes locked with his until he feels that they’re sharing the same breath of air and couldn’t conceive of breaking her gaze.

And then she moves.

Marcus nearly cries out at the suddenness of it, the slight tentative movement sending sparks skidding through all the nerve endings in his skin. Then she does it again, inexorable and arrhythmic, not quite slow but not at all fast and it’s the most exquisite form of torture none of his captors ever thought to employ.

She slides down to her elbows, their chests touching again, faces inches apart, and slides her hips over him and around him, back and forth, back and forth, drawing his breath out and turning it into a sharp whine, a low keening in this throat.

He turns his face into her neck, breathes deep the smell of her hair in his face, latching onto a patch of skin to ground him even as his hips thrust up into hers, uncontrollable. Right at this moment, it’s so very easy to shape the words into the damp curls clinging to her skin, quiet, but needed. True.

-

“You know, I’d been planning something more traditional,” she smiles into the pillow.

“You were planning?”

“What? You said you wanted it to be special and it’s your—you know,”

“Yes, yes, but, planning?”

“I was going to wait. Until I was sure, until I knew if I could give what you—”

He stiffens under her, hand stopping mid-stroke on her arm.

“But then I saw you,” she continues quickly, “and I didn’t have to, I just. After, when I was waiting for you to wake up, I had thought, maybe it’ll be different when I’m not. But I left, and I didn’t see you, and I still, when I saw you again, and you were.” Her arms tighten around him, face buried in his neck, “so normal, so annoyingly still _you_, and all I wanted,” he holds his breath until she continues, “didn’t change.”

“Good.” His voice breaks in the middle of the word. He brings her hand up to his lips, kissing open-mouthed on the palm, and clears his throat. “What kind of tradition? The Minbari have a council that wait outside the bedroom and pray and meditate…”

She sputters against his shoulder blades and smacks his arm, “I was thinking more like music, buying you dinner, roses, that sort of thing.”

“I _like_ roses. You did get me roses, once.”

“I what? No, you see—those were—”

“What?” his eyes are wide and bright and expectant.

“Nevermind.”

-

He wakes in the middle of the night cycle to find her still achingly beautiful. Strong jaw softened in the dark, eyelashes shadowing her cheeks in sleep.

“Don’t look at me like that.” Maybe not so much with the sleep.

He wants to say something that will rile her up, he wants to kiss her so badly it almost hurts, until he remembers (again) that he’s lying half on top of her and they’re both wearing absolutely nothing, and that he can do just that.

“Like what?” he asks, wondering what she sees.

She kisses him.

“How should I look at you?”

She shakes her head, “I’m not. You shouldn’t trust me so much.”

“Are you not worthy of the trust of all lives on this station?”

She sighs and her eyes focus somewhere behind him.

“Marcus.”

He has to kiss her quickly at that.

“…It was incredibly stupid. Unspeakably. It’s… also the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me. Ever.”

“You aren’t angry at me, then?”

“Oh no, this doesn’t get you off the hook. You still shouldn’t have done it.”

“It brought me here.”

“It wouldn’t have.”

“_I can’t help how I feel, Susan_.”

She puts a finger over his lips, leaning close, “I know.” Her eyes are intense and blue and all-encompassing, “But I would never—it’s not what I’d want.” Her voice goes soft and tight, “Do you understand?”

He swallows, trapped in that gaze, but nods, finally. “I do.”

-

“You have wondrous toes.”

“I, what?” Her forehead wrinkles as she squints sleepily up at him.

“And an exquisitely turned ankle,” he demonstrates by laving a tongue up the inside of it, a hand wrapping around her calf.

She drops her head back and groans with laughter, “Marcus, I don’t do mornings.”

“I know,” he tells her generously, “you may rest. I’ll just explore a bit if you don’t mind,” he licks the inside of her thigh experimentally, grazes it lightly with his teeth, “catching up, as it were.”

She makes an unintelligible sound, knee bending up of its own accord and splaying to the side.

“I _knew_ the whole virginity thing was just a ruse to get me into bed.”

“Rangers never lie. Also, I’m a very quick learner.”

“Uh huh.”

“With a marvelously active imagination.”

-

It’s not what he imagined—well, what he let himself—a Ranger’s life doesn’t lend itself to much time for idle fantasizing, but he makes do when he can. Keeps him occupied whenever he gets imprisoned and has to wait before he can break himself out.

He has to stop himself just to look at her, to make sure it’s real, to just _see_ her, remembering pale skin against dark sheets when she’s getting lunch with Garibaldi and Sheridan, uniform pinned perfectly in place.

And he’s not sorry he’d do it again. More for himself than for her—because he can’t imagine a world without Commander Ivanova, ruling with an iron fist and inadvertently charming with her unexpected smiles. It would be more possible to give up anything else, all that he has left, so she could stay.

He’d told Delenn long ago that he had nothing left to give, and she’d told him to give up his grief. He may have, as far as he could at the time, but he’d been left with nothing in his heart, not even loss. Until it started to fill with these people; their vastly different yet strangely coordinated ways; until Susan.

He couldn’t give up her existence, whether he was there to share it with her or not. Duty would not be enough this time.

-

“I can’t, you see,” he tells her one day as they watch the stars spin outside the hull. His eyes stay fixed on the stars outside, “I can’t stand by and lose—watch everything—” he turns to her then, eyes dark and hollow with pain, “not again. Not when there’s a way.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

He turns to watch her, staring out at the starscape for a long moment before she turns back to him, eyes bright.

“I’m not good at this.”

He inclines his head silently but doesn’t speak, so she continues.

“When my mother…killed herself…she had told me to wait for her next door. That she would come for me. She never did. My father distanced himself. And then Ganya—” she let out a shaky breath, “suffice it to say that by the time I made any significant relationships with other people…training for Earthforce—Malcolm—I always kept a distance, I always put my career first. I always.

“The first time I let go of that—I didn’t want to, I tried so hard not to, but Talia.” Her voice goes hushed on the name, and he hurts for her.

She glances at him, mouth tense, eyes bright, “I always went on. Went ahead. Focused on service and duty. Because I had to. I took care of the people under my command, I put them first, not because I put _them_ first, but because I put my duty first and because I didn’t know where I put myself. Marcus—” she pauses.

And then, “You live for the One, you die for the One. I live and die for this station. And mostly, _mostly_ that means we die for the cause if and when it becomes necessary, and the living part is irrelevant. I never—the Captain, Stephen, Garibaldi, Delenn,” she draws a deep, shuddering breath, “You.

“I never had you before.” She turns to him and grazes his cheek with her knuckles. He leans into it immediately, covers her hand with his own, holding it to his skin.

“Susan.”

“And I—it’s scarier than the Shadows or being unstuck in time or a thousand ancient evil races—it’s. I wish you’d live for me.”

“Susan, look at me.” He tilts her chin up to catch her eyes.

“And I don’t, I don’t want you to die for me. I don’t want you to die for anything, not even the One,” her voice is tight and almost broken, “but I can’t ask you to stop risking yourself any more than I can ask it of me, I just. I don’t want you to die for me. I don’t think I could—even the idea of it the first time—and now, after. I can’t be left behind again.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” He pulls her in until they can hold each other close, and kisses her forehead, “I’ve never had anyone of my own to live for before.”

She turns her face into his neck and breathes deep, laughing shakily. “Inconvenient, isn’t it?”

“Well I suppose we’re even if I can claim the same from you,” he smiles into her hair.

-

“Susan,” he strokes her cheek, lips brushing the line of her jaw, the arch of her neck, hidden in the fall of hair, breathing in deep.

Her face turns to him, voice low and soft, “Yes?”

He smiles against her skin, “Nothing, I just wanted to say your name,” and tangles their fingers together, tilts her chin with the other hand and kisses sweetly, “and hear you answer.”

(Mornings, he discovers, are the only time he can get away with this.)

-

Marcus doesn’t remember what made her say it, in the middle of the Zocalo, tracking down a missing shrub, of all things.

But, when she turns to him and narrows her eyes, saying, “I hate you.” his head jerks up and around and he stares at her, eyes intense and heart suddenly doing summersaults.

“Say it again.”

“What? I hate you?”

“No, not like that, just like you did then, with that particular cadence.”

“Uh.”

“I knew it!”

Susan’s cheeks flush.

“Ah, Commander! I see the Drazi have you out on the hunt for their special plant as well. Very strange race, no?” Londo waves them over from the table he and Vir occupy. “Worshipping plants!”

The Centauri delegates look from Susan’s chagrined face to Marcus’s blinding smile, and back.

“What is the matter, eh?”

“We are to be married,” Marcus’s eyes dance.

“Ah,” Londo eyes Susan skeptically, and looks back at Marcus.

“Congratulations!” Vir, at least, is excited on their behalf. “When did you propose?”

“I haven’t, exactly, but she said ‘I hate you.’” Marcus informs them.

Londo nods at last, “Yes, this also is the way of the Centauri.”

(Vir falls back to confused silence.)

-

“Here.” Susan thrusts a box at him and leaves for work.

Her face is actually anxious when he tracks her down at her office so he can ask if he has to put it on himself, and it makes something in his chest twist.

The stylus she’s holding snaps in half in her hand. “That means yes, right?”

“What, a chance to legally bind myself to you so I can annoy you for the rest of our lives? Did you think I was going to refuse?”

His answer is glib, but he’s so distracted by the implications of it and how they’re doing funny things to his insides at a much higher degree than usual when she’s involved that he doesn’t see it coming when she lobs a container of spoo at his head.

“I’ve just never done this before.”

It misses and Marcus grins like a loon. Ivanova never misses. Not unless it’s on purpose.

“I love you too, you know. There’s no need for violence.” His eyes are soft and in his head, he’s planning a planetside wedding. Maybe in a garden.

Susan makes shooing motions with one hand.

“Leave now. I have work to do.”

“Yes, dear.”

She ducks her head back to her paperwork to hide the smile.


End file.
